Re: Managing environments (Python venv, guix environment, etc.)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 02:04:42 +0300
> 
> On 07/24/2016 11:25 AM, sbaugh@catern.com wrote:
> 
> > Just a note: Ideally, Elisp code would also (somehow) go through the
> > environment dispatcher, and see the exec-path and process-environment of
> > the appropriate environment. There is surely Elisp code makes direct use
> > of exec-path/process-environment and it should behave the same as
> > external processes.
> 
> Like Eli said, this seems unwise. But it hints at a logical problem: if 
> start-process and friends are simply documented to use exec-path and 
> process-environment, but use their modified values in some 
> circumstances, someone trying to debug this could have a big problem.

One possible idea is to identify the programs that an environment
would like to depend on it (like the compiler), define a variable for
each one of them (compiler-program etc.), and then modify the
corresponding commands to use that variable, if bound to non-nil, in
preference to exec-path search.